DIY Powerwall Blows Clouds, Competition Out Of The Water

November 6, 2025 by Tyler August 32 Comments

Economists have this idea that we live in an efficient market, but it’s hard to fathom that when disposable vapes are equipped with rechargeable lithium cells. Still, just as market economists point out that if you leave a dollar on the sidewalk someone will pick it up, if you leave dollars worth of lithium batteries on the sidewalk, [Chris Doel] will pick them up and build a DIY home battery bank that we really hope won’t burn down his shop.

The Powerwall-like arrangement uses 500 batteries salvaged from disposable vapes. His personal quality control measure while pulling the cells from the vapes was to skip any that had been discharged past 3 V. On the other hand, we’d be conservative too if we had to live with this thing, solid brick construction or not.

That quality control was accomplished by a clever hack in and of itself: he built a device to blow through the found vapes and see if they lit up. (That starts at 3:20 in the vid.) No light? Not enough voltage. Easy. Even if you’re not building a hoe powerbank, you might take note of that hack if you’re interested in harvesting other people’s deathsticks for lithium cells. The secret ingredient was the pump from a CPAP machine. Actually, it was the only ingredient.)

In another nod to safety, he fuses every battery and the links between the 3D printed OSHA unapproved packs. The juxtoposition between janky build and careful design nods makes this hack delightful, and we really hope [Chris] doesn’t burn down his shed, because like the cut of his jib and hope to see more hacks from this lad. They likely won’t involve nicotine-soaked lithium, however, as the UK is finally banning disposable vapes.

In some ways, that’s a pity, since they’re apparently good for more than just batteries — you can host a website on some of these things. How’s that for market efficiency?

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Hosting A Website On A Disposable Vape

September 15, 2025 by Maya Posch 54 Comments

For the past years people have been collecting disposable vapes primarily for their lithium-ion batteries, but as these disposable vapes have begun to incorporate more elaborate electronics, these too have become an interesting target for reusability. To prove the point of how capable these electronics have become, [BogdanTheGeek] decided to turn one of these vapes into a webserver, appropriately called the vapeserver.

While tearing apart some of the fancier adult pacifiers, [Bogdan] discovered that a number of them feature Puya MCUs, which is a name that some of our esteemed readers may recognize from ‘cheapest MCU’ articles. The target vape has a Puya PY32F002B MCU, which comes with a Cortex-M0+ core at 24 MHz, 3 kB SRAM and 24 kB of Flash. All of which now counts as ‘disposable’ in 2025, it would appear.

Even with a fairly perky MCU, running a webserver with these specs would seem to be a fool’s errand. Getting around the limited hardware involved using the uIP TCP/IP stack, and using SLIP (Serial Line Internet Protocol), along with semihosting to create a serial device that the OS can use like one would a modem and create a visible IP address with the webserver.

The URL to the vapeserver is contained in the article and on the GitHub project page, but out of respect for not melting it down with an unintended DDoS, it isn’t linked here. You are of course totally free to replicate the effort on a disposable adult pacifier of your choice, or other compatible MCU.

Reverse Engineering A Fancy Disposable Vape

April 25, 2024 by Jenny List 26 Comments

Many readers will be aware of the trend for disposable vapes, and how harvesting them for lithium-ion batteries has become a popular pastime in our community. We’re all used to the slim ones about the size of a marker pen, but it’s a surprise to find that they also come in larger sizes equipped with colour LCD screens. [Jason Gin] received one of this type of vape, and set about reverse engineering it.

What he found inside alongside the lithium-ion cell (we love his use of the term ” street lithium” by the way) was an ARM Cortex M0 microcontroller, 1 MB of flash, and that 80×160 display. Some investigation revealed this last part to have an ST7735S controller with an SPI interface. He turned his attention to the flash, which was filled with the bitmaps for the display. Seeing an opportunity there, this lead to the creation of a Windows 95 theme for the device.

Finally, the microcontroller turned out to be accessible with programming tools, with an unprotected firmware. The reverse engineering effort is ongoing, but we hope the result is a small dev board that will at least save some of the from being e-waste. If you’re curious, all the tools used are in a GitHub repository.

Meanwhile, we’ve looked at street lithium harvesting before.

Thanks [DeadFishOnTheLanding] for the tip!